Free Down Among the Gods by Kate Thompson Page B

stupid fantasy? London is crawling with mugs who are trying to be artists.
    He will never, never again allow himself to be diverted by coincidence. It’s dangerous, it leads people into all kinds of illusions and false avenues. He can’t understand now how he came to be deluded in that way; so easily, too. He has always believed that a man must remain in command of his own destiny.
    Patrick stops abruptly. Normally he keeps his aggressive instincts locked securely away along with the rest of his emotions, but in a sudden rage now he thumps the wall with his fist, bruising the side of his hand quite badly. The bitch, the fucking whore. She has his hat.
    He doesn’t know how long he has had that hat and he has managed to forget who gave it to him. But it is more a part of his identity than any other thing he owns. He measures out the rest of the street, each step a curse, but there is no way out of this. She will have to keep it. Nothing will induce him to go back.
    Jessie has been completely thrown off kilter by Patrick’s behaviour. One minute he was flirting like Don Juan and the next he disappeared. She masks her disappointment as well as she can and participates in the rest of the class but she’s sure that she looks a fool. She is wearing the guy’s hat and he is gone. He didn’t even acknowledge her as he left.
    She can’t take the hat off, either. The floor is dusty, and the chairs are all stacked at the back of the room, too far away to travel unnoticed.
    Her drawings, she realises, are atrocious. All she has got out of the classes has been her flirtation with Patrick, and she has already let herself go too far. On the third time of meeting, he has succeeded in knocking her for six, and it’s clearly time to get a grip on herself. She brightens and finishes her last drawing with more assertiveness than usual. The teacher notices and nods her approval. When the class is over, Jessie circulates and introduces herself to some of the other members of the group, feeling slightly ashamed that she hasn’t done it before now. As she makes her way down to the Red Lion with the others, she stops off to leave her drawings and the hat in the car. It isn’t until she is inside the door of the pub that she realises how much she had been hoping that Patrick might have been waiting for her there. But by the time she gets to her second gin and tonic, her spirits are lifting.
    Is there any god greater than Dionysus? Imagine a world bereft of his gifts and condemned to eternal sobriety. Who else among the Olympians has the power to soothe all griefs and lift the soul towards joy? To coax tired feet into dance and weary voices into song? To wind down the over-stimulated mind and wind up the listless one?
    For an hour and a half, Jessie loses herself in laughter and companionship. When she leaves the pub, she is light-hearted. It is not until she catches sight of the black hat in the passenger seat that she is brought back to Hera’s heel with jarring speed.
    ‘Fuck him!’ she says. She almost flings the hat out into the street and there are times afterwards when she wishes that she had. But it wouldn’t have made any difference. Patrick isn’t to blame for what she’s going through, even though he might take credit if he knew. The problem that Jessie has is with Hera.

Chapter Eight
    D IONYSUS WAS, IS, WILL always be on campaign across the world. This time around, he has some new avenues of influence. Vines do not grow in the large modern cities, and nor do mushrooms, but marijuana plants do, and so do small chemical factories and large dealership networks. Dionysus, in all probability, has never been so powerful before. He has taken over the centres of all the major Western cities and, along with his cohorts is marching outwards, through the suburbs and into the rural areas. As well as his old and reliable alcoholic beverages, he is armed with smack, crack, coke, acid and Ecstasy. He looks set to prove once again that he